Hills Hoist: A meditation on memory, migration and the quiet poetry of daily life

At City Library Gallery on Flinders Lane, a humble suburban icon has been transformed into a profound meditation on home, belonging and the emotional complexity of migration.

Hills Hoist, the new solo exhibition by Melbourne-based photographer and visual artist Aldona Kmieć, is now on display until December 7 – and it’s one of the most moving additions to the city’s cultural calendar.

The project began with something deceptively ordinary: an old backyard clothesline. For Kmieć, who migrated from Poland to Australia in 2009, the familiar twirl of a Hills Hoist triggered an unexpected memory of her rural childhood.

It became the genesis for a two-year creative journey spanning analogue and digital photography, textile-based cyanotypes, and a return to her family farm in Poland for a 2025 residency.

Through intimate images of her family’s daily routines under mounting economic and social pressure, Kmieć documents a way of life that is both resilient and fragile. Her photographs – quiet, tender and often melancholic – explore the realities of farming life without romanticising them. They are portraits of endurance, of work that continues despite uncertainty.

The exhibition’s cyanotype works, created with her sister during her recent residency, extend these themes into something tactile. Made using found textiles and family archives, the deep-blue prints carry the imprint of European sunlight, merging old materials with new stories. They become objects of memory – physical reminders of connection across continents.

While the Hills Hoist is often viewed as a symbol of mid-century Australian suburbia, Kmieć reframes it through the eyes of an outsider. Her images highlight its duality: a familiar marker of home for some, yet a representation of exclusion or cultural dissonance for others.

“For someone who’s migrated, even the smallest objects become loaded with memories,” she said.

Supported by a 2025 City of Melbourne Arts Grant and Lifestyle Clotheslines, Hills Hoist speaks to anyone who has left one home to make another. It is an exhibition about inheritance – emotional, cultural and familial – and about the small rituals that carry us through change.

Quiet but deeply resonant, Kmieć’s work reminds us that the everyday can hold immense meaning, and that sometimes the most ordinary objects reveal the greatest truths about who we are.

Hills Hoist runs at City Library Gallery, 253 Flinders Lane, until December 7. •